Clarisse Thorn

I write and speak about subcultures, sexuality, and new media.

I’ve often thought that BDSMers should talk more about our “failed encounters”. Sometimes the best way to learn is through “failure”, or by looking at others’ “failures”. But when a BDSM scene “goes wrong”, it’s often highly personal for everyone concerned. So it’s really hard to talk about and really hard to write about — both for the dominant and submissive partners. This is just like any relationship, really. After all, people rarely talk about their most embarrassing or awkward or otherwise difficult “mistakes made” during vanilla sex, right?

(I use phrases like “failed encounter” and “gone wrong” and “mistakes” with caution, because I think these situations can often be viewed as learning experiences, and therefore they are successful for a lot of purposes! But certainly in the moment they feel like screwups, and a lot of the time they can make the whole relationship very difficult, and I think that most people who have been through them feel as though some kind of failure happened … whether it was a failure of understanding, communication, empathy, caution, or something else.)

Much of the problem, I think, is that people have such a hard time communicating after serious miscommunications and mistakes.

The following quotation is from Staci Newmahr’s Playing At The Edge, an excellent ethnography of the BDSM community. (I’ve changed a few jargon terms so I don’t have to define them for you, but I left two terms I’ll be using throughout this entry: “top” and “bottom”. A top is a blanket term for a dominant and/or sadist. A bottom is a blanket term for a masochist and/or submissive.)

Sophie had been engaged in a long and intimate S&M relationship with Carl, a friend whom she deeply trusted. During the encounter she describes below, Carl changed his approach, and Sophie subsequently felt that Carl was somehow not quite himself. Sophie and Carl never quite recovered from the incident; though they remained friends and tried to do S&M again, it was, according to Sophie, never the same.

Sophie says:

He was very much a rope top. That was his big thing, was tying people up. And he was excellent at tying people up. And our dynamic was always — I mean, yes, he would absolutely hurt me when the time came for that, but there was also always this element — even when he was hurting me, it was done in this incredibly, like, touchingly caring way. And especially when he was tying me up, it was this soothing, wonderful thing.

So one day … Carl starts an encounter with me. Carl had decided in his head, from all the things that he’s heard me say about how I play with another partner, that that’s what I really want from an interaction, in order for it to be the most gratifying and valuable. So we proceeded to have an encounter where Carl was not Carl. And I didn’t stop it because it was so like, I couldn’t understand what was going on. I couldn’t understand why it felt so horrible. And it wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, because I trust him completely. [ … ] I just couldn’t figure out what the problem is, I felt horrible through the whole thing. And he was so out of touch with me that he wasn’t even aware of how horrible I was feeling. The encounter went on for some time … and the second it was over, I … was just, like, you know, traumatized. And he was like, “Oh my God, what’s wrong?” [and] he carried me into the other room. I said something like, “Where did my Carly go?” and then he started to cry. [ … ] He’s like, “I was trying to give you this sadistic experience.”

In Sophie’s story, Carl’s risk backfires. … The risks were unsuccessful; each ended up emotionally distraught and distant. Ultimately, they sacrificed the relationship. (pages 179-180)

Man, that description is so intense. Let’s talk about it.

The Practice

The first thing worth noting about Sophie’s story is that, while she probably had a safeword, she didn’t use it: she says that she “didn’t stop it.” Sometimes, in really confusing S&M scenes, submissives have trouble using their safewords. This does not mean safewords are worthless … but as Thomas MacAulay Millar puts it, “Tops can never be on cruise control.” Non-verbal signals matter, and if an S&M partner — top or bottom! — starts reacting in an unusual way, it’s great to check in with them even if they haven’t used their safeword. Safewords are a useful additional way of communicating about sex, but they can’t replace all communication.

Note also how hard the situation was on the top partner, not just the bottom. Carl ended up crying afterwards!

Next, what I find myself wondering is whether Sophie and Carl could have communicated past this incident. Sophie obviously trusted Carl, and presumably he trusted her. Could they have talked it out and had a successful relationship afterwards? It would have been hard, but maybe they could have done it.

I’ve (rarely) had similar experiences myself — where boundaries were severely tested, and afterwards it was difficult for both me and my partner to work through it. It can absolutely have an immense impact on the relationship. I write about this a bit in my awesome eBook, Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser (read reviews and buy it by clicking here). Here’s a quotation from a section in my book where I’m talking to a dominant partner, with whom I just had such a difficult encounter:

Sometimes, these things happen. One partner pushes a boundary, breaks it; maybe the boundary was unspoken; maybe the dominant misreads signals; maybe the submissive didn’t yet realize that the boundary was there. When it comes to S&M, these things can be so dramatic … yet sometimes they’re nobody’s fault. We find these mental and emotional blocks, and we call them landmines.

My partner didn’t hit the landmine on purpose. He wasn’t trying to push me as hard as he did. And I didn’t warn him off. So the important question becomes — how does one deal with such a situation afterwards?

… “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I never want to do that to you again.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “These things happen. But please do be careful. But don’t worry ….” I trailed off, trying to find words.

It’s so hard to know how to talk about this, especially with people who aren’t used to discussing S&M. When there’s a fuckup, sometimes both sides feel betrayed. The submissive might think: “Maybe I didn’t tell you exactly what to avoid, but sometimes it’s too much to think about, sometimes it’s hard to understand in the moment, sometimes I don’t know ahead of time. Okay, so I pushed myself too hard, but I did it because I’m so into you; I did it because, in that moment, I lost track of myself. And anyway, I thought you could read me. I thought you understood me. I thought you knew. You’ve read me perfectly well before; why not this time? Is it that you don’t care?”

Whereas the dominant might think: “Maybe I went too far, but I thought I could trust you to stop me. I thought I could trust you to tell me. I don’t want to harm you, I just want to push you; I want to break down walls with you. I want to see your eyes go deep and soft. It’s not fair for me to feel like I fucked up, because you fucked up, too. I thought you could take care of yourself. I thought you knew. You’ve communicated perfectly well before; why not this time? Can I rely on you?”

That particular relationship didn’t last, and I think that our most difficult encounter probably affected our trust for each other through the end. Still, I can tell you how we worked on it at the time — and I can tell you that it felt really good. We just listened to each other. And we both assumed that the other person had good intent. By the end of talking it out — which admittedly took a really long time; multiple days — I trusted him more than ever and I felt incredibly close to him.

I’ve been thinking a lot about classic feminist anti-abuse models, which describe how abusers accomplish abuse. One of the tactics abusers consistently use is Minimizing, Denying, and Blaming their partners. Abusers claim that the abuse didn’t happen; they claim it wasn’t important; they blame their partners for what happened. A partner who is willing to listen and change will respond openly to criticism and to mistakes: a non-abusive partner will not minimize, deny, or blame.

And those three things are what my ex-partner did not do. He never claimed that our difficult encounter didn’t happen; he never put the blame on me; he never insisted that it was no big deal. He didn’t even come close to doing those things while we talked it through. He took his emotions and dealt honestly with them, and I did my best to do the same.

Also, in BDSM, we often talk about the concept of “aftercare”: that is, what we say and do after a BDSM scene to ground ourselves, bring ourselves back into the world, and connect with our partners. Aftercare is a huge topic; here is an excellent page full of advice on how to give good aftercare. It’s important to give careful aftercare after any BDSM encounter, but if the encounter has been particularly difficult, it’s doubly important. I have personally had good experiences leaving Super Intense Conversations like the one I describe above until post-aftercare, when all partners have calmed down and dealt with any immediate emotional responses.

I’m writing vaguely, so here are some concrete suggestions for things to say during the conversation after a difficult BDSM encounter:

* “I’m sorry.”
* “I still like you and think you’re a good person.”
* “Do you want to talk about this now? If not now, then let’s set a concrete time for later.”
* “I’m feeling really vulnerable and confused right now.”
* “Why do you think that happened? How were you reading me, and what were you thinking as you responded to me?”
* “How do we feel about this now that we’ve discussed it, and how can we keep it from happening again?”
* “What have we learned about landmines? Are there any particular words or actions that are definitely off-limits from now on?”

I have one final super important caveat to add here: Not all “screwups” are actually screwups. Some are just plain abuse. A human-shaped predator will use words like “miscommunication” and “mistake” to cover up what they do. This post is focused on honest errors, but there are dishonest and evil people out there. In particular, if a person “keeps screwing up” … that’s a terribly bad sign. It is not an inherent part of BDSM to feel roiled up and confused and alienated after a BDSM encounter; most BDSMers feel more intimate and connected after successful encounters. (Here is a previous post that I’ve written about BDSM and abuse. I talk mostly about minimizing/denying/blaming again, but there’s other stuff too.)

I’ve had some iffy results splitting up my posts in the past, but this post is really long and I’m super busy, so I’m just going to post what I have for now. … And! Update! Here’s the followup post: The Theory of an S&M Encounter “Gone Wrong.”

UPDATE, March 2012: I just found some notes that I took during a workshop about BDSM edgeplay that was run by Mollena Williams in late December. (Edgeplay is a term for BDSM activities that feel especially intense for the participants.) Mollena suggests some questions to ask beforehand:

* Have I seen my partner do S&M before? What did they say or do that made me feel good and comfortable? What did they say that made me have an intense reaction? — Pass this information on to the partner ahead of time.
* What does my gut feeling say about this person? — If you have a bad gut feeling about a person, listen to it! Especially for edgeplay.

Mollena also suggested that when BDSMers play at the edge, they “make a contingency plan” ahead of time … not just for the participants, but for everyone watching, since such activities often take place at dungeons. She noted that such a “contingency plan” might contain:

* Honesty and thoroughness, of course
* Each partner giving each other explicit permission to safeword
* Each partner giving each other explicit permission for “things to not be okay” afterwards
* Having someone on hand that each partner can talk to afterwards — not necessarily the same person for everyone involved. This person could be an observer, or might know everyone involved in the scene, or might be relatively separate from it all such as a kink-aware therapist, but the really important thing is that this person can give emotional support in every imaginable scenario.

Thanks, Mollena, for the workshop and the thoughts. I’ve never made such a contingency plan myself, but I definitely think it’s worth considering for people who are planning a heavy scene. (See comments for more discussion.)

* * *

This piece is included in my awesome collection, The S&M Feminist: Best Of Clarisse Thorn. You can buy The S&M Feminist for Amazon Kindle here or other ebook formats here or in paperback here.

16 responses to “What Happens After An S&M Encounter “Gone Wrong””

This is a problem BDSM communities often exacerbate. Newmahr talks about male tops in her community urging her to play only in public spaces with people who are known to the community, and that they react to topping mistakes by questioning the top’s competence. And yet I know first hand that a lot of abusive behavior within communities goes unreported for years because anyone raising the issue gets accused of “drama.” So people have an incentive to keep the good faith mistakes a secret from anyone but the participants — which means other people can’t learn from them and have no model for how to talk about them. (Also, as you know, I have this nagging suspicion that part of the “only play in public, with us” sentiment is maintaining older het male tops’ access to a pool of younger female bottoms, in big city het- and top- dominated communities.)

Aside from that, the personal nature of blown scenes makes them hard to talk about. I don’t really talk about what I do as a top, by agreement with my spouse, but I had a scene hit a serious physical snag recently when I was topping, and we brought it in for a landing with no panic and no mental or physical damage; it helps to have years and years of playing together. We’ve also had a scene go wrong for me, physically but not psychologically. Once, for reasons too complicated to explain, I was topping and ended up with a big, torn blister on my penis — the spot has been slightly oversensitive ever since, and it has been years — and once, I was bottoming and genital application of hot rub shot right past my limit. I ended up in a shower, soaping it off while using milk to take the heat off it. But those were the results of technical mistakes and didn’t affect my sense of trust. In fact, I spent all my energy laughing it off so it didn’t shake my wife’s confidence as a top. I need her to be willing to go heavy, shit happens, and I’m willing to live with consequences.

Part of how we construct scenes helps with this. Both when I’m topping and when I’m bottoming, we tend to explore the physical and psychological elements outside of play first, talk and fantasize about them and let them percolate, and then work into them with a light trial run first. I usually know generally what is coming and I prepared for it mentally. This isn’t everyone’s preference; some people really want to be surprised and ambushed. But that inherently raises the stakes.

In my workshops, I talk a lot about failure. I run workshops semi-regularly on impact play (and a number of other things) where we talk about the physical skills being relatively simple to learn – but the hard part of being a good top being risk managing your scenes so that the inevitable failures will fail softly.

I try and harp on about the fact that it will go wrong. It just will. No matter how careful you are and no matter how awesome you are, something will go wrong. The skill is to manage your scenes so that it fails softly and everybody goes home more or less intact.

I also try and talk about that including emotionally intact. Although I don’t have the same good spiel that I have for physical safety. But having the communication channels and etc to get through the inevitable ‘it went wrong’ without heart break or whatever, is a key thing.

@Thomas — But those were the results of technical mistakes and didn’t affect my sense of trust. In fact, I spent all my energy laughing it off so it didn’t shake my wife’s confidence as a top. I need her to be willing to go heavy, shit happens, and I’m willing to live with consequences.

Yeah, I’ve done that. Sometimes it’s really hard though, especially when the mistakes are not-so-technical/physical. Ideally I want to be able to take a “shit happens” attitude, but I do find that this can actually be much harder on the top than a lot of people give it credit for — especially the empathic tops that I prefer to play with — given the balance of accepted responsibility usually goes to the top. I want a top who is seriously emotionally affected by the scene, but who can process that input and move with it the same way I process and move with my input as a bottom — but I can understand why that’s harder when the top is “more to blame” when things go pear-shaped.

This isn’t everyone’s preference; some people really want to be surprised and ambushed. But that inherently raises the stakes.

I’m into both, I think, although as usual it’s a spectrum ….

@Scootah — So, what are your favorite tips to give during workshops? Anything big that I missed?

You’re the top. You’re the one running the scene. When it goes wrong, it’s because you went wrong. Don’t try and hide from that truth and don’t try and avoid it. When you fuck up, it’s on you. And it will happen. You will fail and it will go wrong. It’s an unavoidable reality. How you prepare for that fact, and how you handle it when it happens is a huge chunk of the difference between a good top and a dangerous idiot.

Prepare for it by first understanding that it will happen. Nobody is perfect and BDSM is very closely akin to an extreme sport. There are risks and mistakes will happen. Set your scenes up to fail softly. Think through what can go wrong, and plan for them to go wrong in a way where the consequences of failure are limited to things everyone involved can live with. Make sure you’re honest about your self and your skills. Make sure that your partners are fully informed of the risks and the management when they consent to the scene. And develop the communication channels so you can still talk through things that go wrong. So that you can preserve the friendships and the relationships that might suffer, even if the bodies involved came through intact.

Then keep it all in perspective. A scene that fails softly might suck. It might ruin a moment or a night, and that’s not ever good. But if nobody died? If nobody suffered serious harm or major injury? If all that went wrong is the scene and everyone walked away healthy? Then own it, learn from it, talk it through with your friends/peers/mentors and talk it through with the people involved in the scene. Get your head around it and learn from it, and keep going. Don’t be a dangerous idiot – but don’t let the weight of responsibility crush you, or crush the fun out of your scenes either.

On the topic of failing softly, the specifics of that vary from scene to scene. From talking through medical history and injuries to clearing the space so there’s no environment damage done if someone falls, to having a spotter to watch for safe calls or bad space body language you miss, to safety ropes to truncate an accidental fall, to starting slowly and being ready to back right off if something goes wrong, to having quick release tools on hand to get someone out of bondage in a hurry – it’s all the same goal – making sure that when something unplanned happens – everyone is ok. Evaluate your scene critically, both while you’re planning it and as you’re playing. What could go wrong? How likely is it to go wrong and how serious is it if it does go wrong? How can I make it less likely to go wrong and less severe if it does go wrong? How do I keep the scene fun while risk managing the play?

My big tip for bottoms is that even if you find arrogance really really sexy, a top with enough humility to learn from their mistakes, and enough care to put aside their arrogance for your safety, is much more likely to be a good person to play with.

as a quick addendum to the notion that when a scene goes wrong, it’s on you as the top – I don’t mean to imply that there’s never shared fault or blame or that bottoms can just show up and have no responsibility regardless of their actions.

My point is more that there’s no benefit for the top in engaging in the blame game. There’s no gain in trying to shuffle the blame. Own whatever went wrong and learn from it. Maybe you mucked up the rope tie. Maybe you didn’t negotiate the scene well enough. Maybe you just picked a play partner who wasn’t a good fit for you/the scene/whatever. Some faults are unavoidable – but for almost everything that will ever ‘go wrong’ in a scene – there was a point somewhere were you could have done something different and avoided it. Figure out where that point was, and learn from it. Sometimes it won’t be practical to do things differently next time – but the more you think about it – the better prepared you are to come up with a better way.

“Some faults are unavoidable – but for almost everything that will ever ‘go wrong’ in a scene – there was a point somewhere were you could have done something different and avoided it.”

Think about this in terms of accidents or near misses when driving. You cannot control what other drivers do, not completely, but you can to some extent. Same thing with subs/bottoms. What you do have control of is your own behaviour. What can you do to avoid that dangerous situation another time – while still driving.
For example. I hate being tailgated. So I pull over and stop and let the tailgater go – they can crash into the back of someone else.

Here’s my example of something going wrong. I was at fault as the top in one respect, but equally, there’s the issue of not being able to predict behaviour of another party.

It actually happened towards the start of a scene, and we carried on perfectly fine afterwards, but it’s a pretty good illustration I think.

I had my partner bound over the back of a chair. For the sake of limited space and her comfort, she was able to rest her head on a table, providing effectively five points of stability and, so I thought, zero risk of anything untoward happening as regards, say, toppling over. No gag or anything, so also full ease of communication.

I made the mistake of thinking that I could briefly go into another room to prepare a surprise for my partner. I know that I should not really leave a bound person on their own for any length of time, so that was my screw-up.

A minute or two after I stepped into the other room – **THUD** I rushed back and found the chair and my partner (thankfully unhurt) on their side.

“What happened?”

“I tried to shift my position by jogging the chair. You shouldn’t have left me on my own!”

“You’re right, I shouldn’t. But if you wanted to shift your position, why didn’t you just call me?”

“In the middle of a scene, I wasn’t exactly thinking logically!”

I didn’t try to dodge responsibility, although I felt like I had a pretty good reason for thinking it was safe. The points in the quoted Newmahr passage of, “I thought I could trust you to communicate,” and “It’s not fair for me to feel like I fucked up, because you fucked up, too. I thought you could take care of yourself,” were uppermost in my mind in the immediate aftermath, once it was established that there was no harm done by the crash.

So once we agreed that maybe a sub should stay where she’s put until given permission to “adjust her position”, and that a Dom shouldn’t leave a bound partner alone, we actually felt pretty good about continuing the scene.

***

As for scenes “gone wrong” in the emotional sense that seems to be the main thrust of the OP, I think generally I (as the top) have been the one it went wrong for, and brought things to a stop.

My ‘own the failure’ philosophy really isn’t about assigning blame. It’s a flaw in the language of the theory that it kind of comes across that way and I keep trying to find a better way to communicate the core idea.

You can’t predict everything. You can’t test everything. You can’t protect against everything. But as a top, it’s your job to try really hard to predict everything, test everything and protect from everything. From picking toys to picking scenes to arranging furniture and play space to picking partners to monitoring partners. It’s a huge burden – but as the top, it’s on you. Not in a duty of care, lawsuits sort of way. But on a ongoing access to play partners/reputation in the scene/being able to live with yourself level.

Do what you can to make sure it doesn’t go wrong. Do what you can to minimize the consequences when it does go wrong. Own whatever goes wrong and learn from it for next time.

For a bottom, when a scene goes wrong, the consequences are often much more severe. IE I know a few bottoms who’ve spent time in hospital because of scenes gone wrong. I’ve had people in the circle of friends who I didn’t personally know, end up dead from scenes gone wrong. But for the most part – it’s not a complex after the fact analysis. They trusted someone they shouldn’t have. Someone else failed them. The challenges for processing that/living with it/moving on/avoiding the same mistake in future are substantial – and there’s a littany of advice out there on how to avoid being that bottom. Some of it I disagree with/dislike – but you can look through Fetlife.com’s kinky and popular writing any given day and probably find a couple of people’s advice on how to avoid terrible tops.

For a top? Well, I don’t know any tops who’ve ended up in the ER because the other person in the scene was a bad person to play with (I know some people who’ve ended up dealing with life long STI’s, but that’s a different sort of risk). But I know a lot of tops who have had to live with some pretty rough realities. I know a lot of tops who’ve found themselves completely unable to find new play partners and treated like dirt. I know a lot of newbie dominants who’ve lied about their experience just because nobody would give them the time of day when they were honest. I know dominants who’ve done a scene beyond their skills because their partner desperately wanted it and pushed them to go there, and then found themselves ostracised because it went wrong while their partner gets all the sympathy in the world. Etc. I’m not sure those people universally deserve the kind of ostracism / scorn / avoidance at all costs policies that most scene groups advocate – but some of them certainly do. And for all the advice on chosing a better top / avoiding an awful top / surviving a scene gone wrong as a bottom, there’s very little advice out there about how to avoid those situations and even less on how to survive the consequences of those situations after the fact. I think the best way to first avoid the situation and probably the best way to survive the fall out afterward – is to own the failure. Don’t try to hide it or hide from it. Understand what went wrong, learn from it, and grow from it.

The advice contained within was undoubtedly wise – but it’s very difficult to follow. It’s very difficult to not be human and have typical flawed human reactions to failure.

I’m a “switch” I suppose, although I always thought of myself as a definite bottom until recently. My partner is a switch and, in some ways, makes a better bottom. Not that I would categorise him as such, and these things are ever-changing. But I found myself being the top for him. While fun in so many ways, it doesn’t come as “naturally” to me as being the bottom.
The first failure came the other night where he responded negatively to something I said. My (admittedly already low) top-confidence vanished in an instant, not helped by the fact that he had already been reacting differently to the things I was doing, I understand to make it more challenging. I wasn’t ready for that, but I hadn’t explicitly said so beforehand so I don’t exactly blame him, although his negative reaction was done in a callous, thoughtless way – I think his intention was to make light of it and he wouldn’t have foreseen how it would affect me.
But I could not stop myself being really hurt and pissed off. I mean, I sulked and for a good half hour. My confidence was shot; for a few bitter minutes I actually felt like refusing to ever top again.
He apologised for his reaction later, and we were fine, I explained what was wrong with me etc. I think he understood why I reacted the way I did. But that was later.
Those thoughts you mentioned, “You’ve communicated perfectly well before; why not this time? Can I rely on you?” and “Is it that you don’t care?”, they’re often inevitable. And dealing with that inevitability is hard. In fact, while I’m not angry at him and I don’t think he’s angry at me, I’m still not recovered entirely from that seemingly-small failure. It makes me wary. I don’t want to think those thoughts and have those reactions.
Am I a bad top? With time, do you learn how to take that sort of thing better? I don’t know, but I suppose I’ll find out. Still, I think that being reasonable while emotionally-charged and vulnerable and possibly upset/angry is as big a mountain to climb as many of the others in BDSM.

@SnowdropExplodes — The points in the quoted Newmahr passage of, “I thought I could trust you to communicate,” and “It’s not fair for me to feel like I fucked up, because you fucked up, too. I thought you could take care of yourself,” were uppermost in my mind in the immediate aftermath, once it was established that there was no harm done by the crash.

To clarify — those quotes are from something I wrote, not Newmahr. Newmahr’s quote is earlier in the post.

As for scenes “gone wrong” in the emotional sense that seems to be the main thrust of the OP, I think generally I (as the top) have been the one it went wrong for, and brought things to a stop.

I’d love to read more about this if you would care to share.

@Dagny — Am I a bad top? With time, do you learn how to take that sort of thing better? I don’t know, but I suppose I’ll find out. Still, I think that being reasonable while emotionally-charged and vulnerable and possibly upset/angry is as big a mountain to climb as many of the others in BDSM.

It’s definitely hard! And I didn’t mean to minimize how hard it can be.

@Scootah (and everyone, I guess) — I went to a workshop on edgeplay by Mollena Williams a few weeks ago, and I came away with a bunch of super intense thoughts, but I think I might have lost the paper I wrote them down on. I knew I should have just taken notes on my laptop. Anyway, the big thing I remember is that she suggested having a concrete “Contingency Plan”. Not just physically, but emotionally. Stuff like: Who do you go to for aftercare, if you feel like you can’t accept aftercare from your partner after the scene?

Have any of you folks ever developed anything like that? I confess I never have.

@Clarisse, “Back in the day”, kind of, when I first started experimenting with BDSM. We didn’t write it down though so I can’t remember half of what we had planned out. We were so terrified of screwing up.

I struggle with that amount of planning. I don’t know, maybe it’s not for everyone. As long as important boundaries or needs are discussed beforehand and both partners listen properly, you can mostly avoid the really huge hiccups.

I might bring it up with my sub partner, however, as he is more emotionally affected by BDSM encounters than I am; he needs aftercare, I don’t, he still has some conflicts about himself and shame, I’m mostly over mine, etc. Maybe that would make him feel safer, and maybe it would make the encounters feel less like a shameful secret to him and more…normal? Food for thought.

Ah, that was bad writing on my part. It was meant to be read as “the points raised in the quoted passage, then later referred to in the OP as…” I think I left rather too much as implicit or “between the lines”!

As for scenes “gone wrong” in the emotional sense that seems to be the main thrust of the OP, I think generally I (as the top) have been the one it went wrong for, and brought things to a stop.

I’d love to read more about this if you would care to share

The most dramatic example I can recall – in terms of emotional “badness” – was when I was playing with SNS and she’d told me her period was due. What I didn’t know is that early period blood often appears brown, not red. I had also seen something fairly recently about injuries of ruptures between the vagina and the rectum…

I was giving her a vigorous finger-fucking (I think three fingers at the time) when suddenly my fingers came away covered in brown stuff, and I just panicked, thinking I’d done some horrible damage to her insides. She quickly explained the gap in my knowledge, and pointed out that she’d have been hurting a whole lot more if I’d caused that level of injury. But the panic had happened and it broke the mood completely. We had to take a pause and do something a little less physically intimate as a result, so I could calm down again. My very obvious emotional reaction also had an effect on her state of mind, so she too was brought down from the very nice place where we had been.

“Contingency Plan”. Not just physically, but emotionally. Stuff like: Who do you go to for aftercare, if you feel like you can’t accept aftercare from your partner after the scene?

Have any of you folks ever developed anything like that? I confess I never have.

I don’t think I have ever developed a concrete contingency plan, although I guess I have ideas of who I could talk to or whatever if I needed to, and I think a lot of the techniques I’ve learned for dealing with depression also help for how to handle emotional dramas of other kinds, too. I sort of feel like I have a toolbox for the aftermath – although, as the example above shows, it doesn’t help as much for handling the “in the moment” elements.

[…] please don’t let this post stop you. Alternatively, for those already playing, then I found this post and this followup by Clarisse Thorn had interesting suggestions for dealing with S&M play gone […]

About Clarisse

On the other hand, I also wrote a different book about the subculture of men who trade tips on how to seduce and manipulate women:

I give great lectures on my favorite topics. I've spoken at a huge variety of places — academic institutions like the University of Chicago; new media conventions like South By Southwest; museums like the Museum of Sex; and lots of others.

I established myself by creating this blog. I don't update the blog much anymore, but you can still read my archives. My best writing is available in my books, anyway.

I've lived in Swaziland, Greece, Chicago, and a lot of other places. I've worked in game design, public health, bookstores, and digital journalism. Now I live in San Francisco; I make my living as a media strategist, editor, and writer.